The Expanding Earth - an Essay Review (Carey 1975)

[Florian]

This review by Carey was published in Earth Science Reviews in 1975. Part of this review are outdated but it is of historic importance and many arguments are still perfectly valid today.

"The Expanding Earth - an Essay Review" SW Carey (1975) Earth-Science Reviews 11 p 105-143 (pdf reprint HERE)

Abstract:
The Wegener bombshell of gross continental separation promptly triggered the concept of earth expansion as an alternative to drift, but books in German by Lindemann (1927), Bogolepow (1930), Hilgenberg (1933), and Keindl (1940) got little attention in the English literature. A second wave by Egyed (1956), Carey (1958), Heezen (1959), Barnett (1962), Brösske (1962), Neyman (1962), Creer (1965), Dearnley (1965), Jordan (1966), Steiner (1967), and Meservey (1969) ran against the orthodox tide, which, in geology, is lethal. Discovery that pan-global oceanic rifts had palaeomagnetic growth zones, and confirmation by JOIDES that all ocean floors are post-Palaeozoic, fit equally displacement or expansion models. The plate model combines ocean floor growth with “axioms” that orogenesis implies crustal shortening, that trenches are underthrusts, and that earth radius is constant. All three “axioms” are probably invalid. The plate theory has fatal falsities. Africa and Antarctica are ringed by expanding rifts and each should have post-Palaeozoic subduction zones to swallow more than 3,000 km of crust. These do not exist. This dilemma could be side-stepped by fixing one continent to its mantle, but escape is impossible with two such continents. The Permian equator now lies 37° north of the equator in North America, 40° north in Europe, and 17° north in Siberia, which is impossible on an earth of constant radius without at least 6,000 km of post-Palaeozoic subduction within the Arctic. On the plate model the present Pacific must be smaller than the Permian Pacific by the combined area of the Arctic, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Yet the continents round the periphery of the Pacific have all moved further apart in the direction of the Pacific margin. Meservey has shown the topological impossibility of progression from any Pangaea configuration to the present distribution of the continents except on an expanding earth. Phase-change from inherited metastable super-dense matter, change of G with time, and secular growth of mass at the expense of energy, have been offered as causes of expansion. These could be adequate, but raise other anomalies. Some new fundamental principles of physics may still remain to be discovered.